In order to meet the relentless public demand for reviews of five year old games:

One of the key strategic decisions in the game is where to put your vault. You want to keep that sucker safe, but you also want your men to be able to access it easily.

For the purposes of this analogy, you will be required to imagine yourself as someone who greatly enjoys steak but rarely has the chance to eat it:

I am making you a steak. Excellent, high-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, whole beef, etcetra kind of steak. Cooked just the way you like. Now I am going to cut that sucker up and use it to make twenty gallons of soup, all for you. I call this soup Evil Genius.

Evil Genius is a brilliant game. You play as a mastermind set on world domination. The goal is to recruit a criminal empire, seize crucial world resources, construct a high tech doom fortress at the heart of a volcano, and then unleash a doomsday weapon to take over the world. The whole thing is done in the style of a classic 60’s Bond movie, with you playing the part of the scheming villain.

The game is a smattering of genres that combines strategic base-building, unit management, economic management, and map control. It does this seamlessly, and with a dose of genuine humor and deliberate, enthusiastic camp. It’s witty. It’s innovative. It’s charming. I played the game through once and enjoyed the gameplay, but I doubt I’ll ever play it again.

Units begin on the left as simple workers, and you have to train them up through job paths to turn them into more powerful or specialized units. It takes a long time for a new grunt to work up through the chain to become one of the top-tier units. Annoyingly, units lose their earlier utility when they are promoted to a new rank. If a mission calls for eight valets and you don’t have enough, you can’t use diplomats instead, even though a diplomat should know everything a valet would know. (Since he used to be one.) This means you have a lot less freedom to dictate the makup of your forces than it might seem. It also means that occasionally you’ll spend long periods of time waiting for men to train up to re-balance your personnel makeup.

The problem is that the game feels like it has too much needless filler. Once you make a strategic decision, there is far too much busywork and waiting between making the decision and seeing the result.

The game will go something like this:

The world map is color-coded by law enforcement faction. Each faction has its own heat level, and you want to avoid getting the heat too high with any single faction or they’ll drop elite commandos on your island who will wreck your base and kill your dudes. You also don’t want to piss off all factions at the same time. The trick is to balance your heat load, striking at a faction and then withdrawing from their territory until they cool off.

Ok, I think I want to steal artifact X from nation Y. Let’s see… The job calls for six diplomat units, and I only have four. So, I need to train up two more units. And because you never ever want to send ALL of your diplomats out at once (if your last diplomat dies you won’t be able to make more until you kidnap another one, a lengthy process in and of itself) I should actually train four. That’s going to take at least five minutes.

Okay, I have the units I need… no wait, one of the diplomats got killed, I need another. So a couple of more minutes.

Okay, now I send them to the world map. It will take the units a few seconds to get the idea, and then a few more for them to drop whatever they’re doing, and then a few more for them to hike all the way from their current location to the helipad.

Now the units are “in transit” for a couple of minutes.

Ah! Finally the chopper delivered the units to the world map. Now I can… Aw hell. The good guys have just happened to place a superspy unit on the same area of the world map. That superspy will wipe out every one of my units in the country if I try to act, so I tell my team to go into hiding and wait a couple of minutes for the spy to go away.

I go fuss with my base for a minute or two, make sure the training programs are rolling, the perimeter is clear, the cash is secure, and then I kick off the next stage of research. When I come back I see my units left hiding automatically. (This is my #1 hated feature of the game, there is no way to get your guys to STAY in hiding, so you have to keep going back and re-hiding them manually while you move your other pieces into place. Most of the lost time was because of this feature.) Once they came out of hiding, one of them was picked off by the police. Sigh. Now I’m one diplomat short and I can’t attempt the mission.

I order the team to go back into hiding and go train another diplomat.

I order the team to go back into hiding again and tell the diplomat to head for the chopper.

I order the team to go back into hiding again again and wait for the diplomat to show up on the world map.

Finally the units are all in place and I hit the “Go!” button on the mission. Now I have to wait five minutes to see the result.

Darn. That superspy unit popped up on the map halfway through the mission and wiped out my team. I’ve been trying to make this mission happen for half an hour and now I’m back to square one.

Whoops. Actually I’m worse off than when I started. The failed mission generated an insane level of heat and now the good guys are sending strike teams to attack my island. I have to spend several minutes fighting the strike teams. Then I’ll need to wait several more for the heat to die down. Then I’ll need to replace all of my diplomats. Then I can start over.

Thus you can spend 45 minutes or so just trying to pull off a single five-minute mission. This is fun the first few times and feels appropriately like an international game of cat-and-mouse. But going through that same process dozens of times just killed it for me. I was sick to death of the whole “hurry up and wait” pace of the game before I even hit the halfway point. I’d make a decision, and then I’d spend half an hour doing very routine, repetitive things to make the decision a reality. My play-through of the game took twelve hours (give or take) and I feel like it offered about four hours of real entertainment.

There’s nothing wrong with a slow pace if I can jump to another window and play or do something else, but your empire requires constant attention to keep from falling apart. You have to watch the front door and tag enemies for elimination, you have to keep re-hiding your guys on the world map.

You get to gather together the various criminal elements and put them under your thumb. It feels good to be bad.

The game fell apart for me at the halfway point. I’d built my base and was getting a little restless. I was starting to feel like it was time to start wrapping things up. Instead, it was time to start over on a whole new map. I had to tear down and build a whole new base from scratch on a new island. It then takes at least an hour to get your new place up and running again so you can resume your quest to dominate the world. Instead of entering the home stretch, I’d been moved back to the starting line. By the last hour of the game it was starting to feel like an endurance test.

This is all a shame, because the game didn’t need this much padding or filler. There are three evil Genius archetypes to choose from, and three different doomsday devices you could build. There are also all sorts of strategies and approaches you could take in designing your base. This game has a ton of replay value, and if the game had been shorter I’d have been happy to play through multiple times.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about this flaw in the game, which may seem unfair because it’s basically the only thing wrong with what might otherwise become a treasured classic for me. This is a great game and worth playing. (You should be able to find it in the bargain bin for cheap. It’s only ten bucks on Steam, if you’re into that sort of thing. A demo is also available.) Like twenty gallons of steak soup, it would be so much better if they hadn’t felt the need to add so much filler.

44 thoughts on “Evil Genius”

ah, i remember this game, an awesome concept in an awesome setting following the awesome steps of Dungeon Keeper but fails epically by not allowing you to interact with the “missions” and having less action than DK with little to do outside of setting traps that don’t work that well and you have to grind yourself insane to unlock

playing a Bond villain is priceless tho, gaming needs more evil midgets with monocles in the hands of players

Myself, I never finished the game. The final mission, when you’re sending your Doomsday weapon into space, requires you to keep your base safe while maintaining agents around the world doing some missions simultaneously.

Of course, this generates ludicrous amounts of heat, and everytime I’ve gotten that far, my base becomes overwhelmed with agents trying to bust down my doors. I spend so much time just repairing the damage, cleaning up bodies, and replacing lost men that I never get around to the part of finishing the frickin’ Doomsday weapon!

Also a pain: The “James Bond”-esque super agents. You either wait for these guys to get bored and go away or you build a maximum security facility and hope that you can keep them managed.

I always went with the latter. It wasn’t always successful; somehow these guys can move through your traps with ridiculous ease. Still, an isolated prison off of a hallway filled with multiple death traps works quite well. I often enjoy figuring out what combos I can set up.

Oh, and don’t bother with the gas traps; I’ve found that nobody walks into the trap zone when they trigger the trap.

I’ve started up this game recently, I’m now trying to secure the funds for my second island. The reasons you give are the reasons I haven’t played it in 2 weeks now. And I highly doubt I’ll ever finish it. Once I was at a point where multiple good guys stormed my base and destroy my most expensive equipment on multiple occasions I called it quits.

I also hate it that I can’t give my minions set orders. For example when I give an interrogation command, I want him interrogated now, not after he’s escaped for the 5th time.

Edit @Hal: I’ve had more of my own minions die from gastraps than intruders. Placing blowers in a circle is pretty fun though. Untill a good guy sabotages the trigger and you have to rebuild it and reconnect it to 8 traps, just to get it blown up again. (Add the afformentioned fact that it can take ages for one of your minions to actually find the time to build the trigger)

I almost got to the doomsday phase and even got rid of most of the superspies. Bond kept visiting my deathtrap-filled base with ridiculous ease (he one-hit-kills everything) and the only solution I came up with was to keep him busy by constantly shoving him from one torture device (or scientific device) to another. If I kept my eyes off him for 10 seconds after he was “processed”, he’d revert back to his one-hit-kill mode and I’d have to spend the next hour or so cleaning up after his rampage. Also, the good guys kept sending commando teams against me. Sure, they’ll all die in the first room, but if they keep coming nonstop they’ll eventually wear down a trap or two.

Evil Genius had so much potential (and so many bugs) that I still reinstall it and play just to watch the ‘torture’ devices in action. I quit when the first super agent pops up. You can’t do anything about it until you hit the second base, oh several hours later? And don’t even get me started on the missile test.

I enjoy a slow paced game some times, heck I often still ‘play’ Transport Tycoon while watching TV or whatever. This is a game that you can walk away from for an hour or two and more or less the world keeps chugging on with out your micro management.

I’m not sure a few patches or even an expansion could have fixed everything that was wrong but can you imagine an Evil Genius 2? Someone needs to buy up that IP.

I haven’t played the game, but based on both the review and the comments, it seems to me that perhaps the designers wanted your minions to be woefully incompetent. I mean, think about all of the lampshades hung by the first Austin Powers movie. Constant micromanagement is the minimum required to keep your henchmen from shooting themselves. It would seem the designers didn’t just borrow the aesthetic, but the tropes as well.

Not that this is excusable. Letting your concept get in the way of enjoyable game play is a surefire way to get heckled and deservedly so. But if you’re an evil genius, isn’t finding good help impossible?

I got bored with it. I felt like progress was too slow for what I needed to do, and much much too slow for what I *wanted* to do.

Plus, little things like not being able to direct my guards to a location. If I see the soldiers, and I want them killed, I can’t send my guards to where they are. Instead, I have to label them for killing, and wait for guards to see them.

Also, the valets are retarded. This is especially bad if you lock up super agents, since they break free, destroy things, rendering them on fire, and valets will run in before anyone else has a chance to deal with the situation at hand.

A few flaws, but not a bad game. The most fun I had was working out ingenious combinations of traps, although they weren’t always exactly what I was hoping for.

Evil Genius = awesome game. That said, you only really need to play half-way through. I never even finished it, first time through, too much micromanagement, and too frustrating when the super-spies land on the island. The ending wasn’t worth the time spent to get there.

I suspect an Evil Genius 2 would be all sorts of awesome if they fix some of these issues you talked about.

I love this game and have lost entire weekends to it. I think the secret to really enjoying it is to build as agent-proof a base as possible. During times when there’s low heat on the map you should be able to ignore your base for long periods of time without worry. There are three tricks I use to make that happen:

1) The stage of the game when the maid is wandering around the island is the last time you’ll be completely unmolested by agents. Exploit that by sending almost all minions into the world to steal from the wealthiest areas. I’ve started a game one weekend, left it running this way all week, and picked it up the next weekend with more gold in the vault than I’ll ever need (you need to prep by building a BIG vault), so all financial pressure is removed and you can have more fun building any crazy crap you want.

2) The areas just inside the base entrances should have a strict zero-heat policy. This gives agents a safe area to snoop around in and waste time while your evil plans go on undisturbed behind the long, multi-doored, usually S-trap shaped tunnel through the middle of your base. Remember, an agent going home with no heat is far better than having an agent come to your island and disappear inside a deadly trap (even though it is less entertaining).

3) As an additional time waster, place those expensive external huts around the island (see step 1 for not caring how expensive they are). Lock them with level 3 doors (agents love cracking higher level doors) and place intellect-sapping traps inside (the pop-up shooting range dummy things work great). Once the agents break in, the traps sap their memory of what they’ve checked. You’ll see agents go back and forth between the same two huts for the entire duration of their visit.

In your 12-step list, this strategy eliminates step 2 (units never die when heat is low, no firefights are going on) and hopefully shortens step 6 (since checking the perimeter is easy when all the agents are outside trying to break into empty buildings) enough to eliminate steps 7-9. Also, not only should you make sure you don’t send all your minions of whatever type on a mission, you should always send more minions than you need so it doesn’t matter so much if one gets picked off. Also, more minions of the right types will help keep the others from getting killed (military ones), finish the mission faster (science ones), and reduce the heat generated (diplomacy ones).

I might also just be weird, but I found the missions to be kind of a distraction. I mostly enjoyed sitting back and seeing how well my base could take care of itself without my micromanagement.

Edit: Wow, went from 2 comments to 10 while I wrote that treatise :/

@Coffee: You can’t direct plain minions, but you can direct your henchmen and they can gather plain minions to follow them around for a while. Make sure you build a spot where lots of military minions like to hang out – then you can send in a henchman and gather a strike force in no time.

This looks as awesome as bacon tastes. I’m actually in a Branding/Identity class and the logo I’m designing is for a evil genius-type corporation. Zero practical application, but it’s gonna be a fun quarter.

It sounds to me like it’s a completely accurate simulation of a Bond villain’s life. I mean, think about it, every single thing that Shamus and the commenters to date have complained about is exactly what a Bond villain would say, assuming he’d survived the movie.

Of course, it’s not a fun game that way, but how could it be? After all, the evil genius always loses, and usually humiliatingly so. To make it a fun game, they’d have had to massively violate the premise.

Indeed, that game had a few aggravating flaws, but I still revisit every now and then for the near slapstick humor in every character’s movement. Plus, it pokes at my base building bone.

It really is trying to be a new Dungeon Keeper, but is pretty sad how badly they messed up the gameplay. I wish there was a game mode where everything is unlocked at the start. I hate the tutorial mode at the stat of it, any every, game.

“We’re sure you can’t handle the game if everything was available at once.” And while that may be true the first time, I certainly can handle it the second and third times.

Evil Genius is one of those rare gems that has remained on my rig since the day I installed it. I seem to revisit it every few months. Must be that subtractive geometry fetish of mine that we discussed in the BSP posts :)

For me, EG just hit it right on so many levels – the gameplay, the visuals, the humor … just great!

Also, I reinstalled Dungeon Keeper a while back, but the graphics were just too dated (to a glaring degree on today’s larger monitors). I had a recent, brief “repeat-romp” with Startopia, as well. It fared a bit better than DK, but I thought DK’s gameplay was better.

With EG, the big downfalls for me were the limited number of maps (I wished there had been shorter “scenarios” on each map, with more maps. I didn’t mind the rebuilding. Also, I didn’t “get” the hotel cover thing. Did it generate any revenue? Seemed that it should have. I agree, as a “front” it was pretty pointless. Still, overall, I liked this game a lot.

I completely agree with the points raised. Evil genius is a needlessly slow game that can occasionally brutally punish you. To be honest I always found the best way to play was the following:
1.) Start game
2.) Build base (for this step, I usually went with a fountain looking design. A very long entrance hall surrounded by the other rooms, but they are only accessible from the end)
3.) Set minions upon the word to steal
4.) Go watch a movie

Usually when I got back, all my minions would have died (and been auto replaced) and I would have several million dollars. This made a lot of the game’s shenanigans a lot more bearable.

Honestly the only way I made it through the game was the trap building. There is an Evil Genius wiki out there somewhere that helps too.

I’ve played it a couple of times, and I found that there were two modifications you could make to the game files that for me greatly increased enjoyment. The first was to increase the maximum minion count to 150, this gives you a lot more flexibility in assignments and a general speedup of work without unbalancing things. Secondly modifying sentry guns to allow them to be placed indoors. This makes it much easier to contain those pesky super agents, just stick them in a locked room with a half dozen or so sentry guns.

I bought this from GOG not too long ago and played the heck out of it until it became the grind you are describing… then I just cheated to the end. :) If they fixed the gameplay in a sequel, it’d be awesome, but don’t see that happening any time soon.

I’ve found that cheating to give yourself an extra two million dollars at the beginning really helps. More money = faster base building and hiring of minions. More minions mitigates the tedium of the world map missions and having all that cash to start with frees up the minions from having to go and steal cash for you.

Basically, I recommend “tweaking” the game with cheats until you find a good balance between too easy (several cheats) and too frustrating (no cheats).

The game is so hard so that you’d understand that crime doesn’t pay.:)
now, the game is very frustrating in some parts, especially the missile test.
I have played at easy, and if you know how to use your henchmen you get rid of the enemies with great ease.Also, henchmen reduce the changes of death for your minions on the world map, just like the fighting minions do.
Not only that you can steal a lot at the beginning when the world doesn’t notice you, but you may also plot, especially with lord Kane, as he is very good at plotting.

I agree completely with your review. I just downloaded and played this game from GoG about a month ago. I loved it at first but it soon took a nose-dive into tedious micromanagement.

I managed to prolong the life of the game through the debug console. You can find a ‘speed’ command there, which, of course, controls the speed of the game. I don’t know why this wasn’t a standard feature. A small warning, though: once you start playing a 10x speed, you will never be able to tolerate the game at normal speed again.

Ah, I had lots of fun with Evil Genius when I got it. But then I am a huge fan of micromanagement and balancing personnel resources. There are definitely different kinds of nerds out there to whom the game will or will not appeal.

Unfortunately, I got a new computer a few years back so I could run games better. The Securom on the CDs decided that I was no longer qualified to play my game. SECUROOOOOOOMMMMMM!!!

Imagine my shock and joy to discover that Good Old Games has it. DRMless?! Yay!

Oh, and a tip for anyone having trouble with agents everywhere: Smack the Red Alert button every once in a while. Sure, shooting everyone your minions come into contact with causes some trouble for a time, but once the freezers are stocked with bodybags and everyone is either dead or far outside, things calm down surprisingly quickly.

My experience is basically the same. I got up to the volcano lair (I can’t remember now if that’s the second or third) and then just got bored and gave up. The base management was fun, but all the micromanagement in the world map was just aggravating.

I also was deeply disappointed to discover that while the volcano lair had tiles adjacent to the core that looked like you could dig them out, it wouldn’t actually let you do so. There went my dreams of having a blower trap cast enemy agents into the lava pit… :(

In short: lots of potential; not-so-good execution. But now I’m tempted to play it again anyway.

Interestingly someone did pick up the IP for Evil Genius. Rebillion in Oxford who are currently working on the new Aliens vs Predator (the original PC title they did still rates as one of the most atmospheric games for me)

I bought Evil Genius on steam one weekend when it was a pitanance. However it doesn’t like widescreens resolutions much at all and I had to turn to teh community for a patch to make it work.

Mind, its part of a serious too. With a hilarious ending, that shows what comes after the doomsday device.http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408342 Part 1, not safe for work ;)
Nor is the rest, still, quite hilarious to watch.

The game itself. Played it too, got bored of it because of said problems and used cheats to give me money. Then it was quite fun.
Nothing more to add that.

I agree with the comment about liking the starting over bit. There are mistakes you make the first time around that you simply couldn’t avoid, either because you didn’t know what objects your R&D would develop (and thus how big to build the rooms) or you didn’t have the rooms when you needed them to make your base work properly before halfway through the game.

The amount of micromanaging you do depends a lot on how you design your base. My first one went pretty much the way Shamus describes with a side order of frequent reloading to recover after captain america destroys half of it. Depending on how you do it the game can be a lot less micromanagy, I had a base that automatically captured and executed any incoming agents with practically no losses (if agents breach a level 4 security door they are automatically tagged for capture and if agents see more than one door they always attempt to breach the highest security one), I only needed to attend to it when a superagent showed up and even they weren’t too much trouble with the right henchmen on hand (annoying that when you kill them once you can’t just dump their body into the sea though, it shouldn’t be necassary to fight the same one 2-3 times to make them go away)

Still, a game shouldn’t have “you don’t have to deal with the boring bits” as a reward for using a particular strategy, this that implies deliberately boring anyone who’d want to do things a different way. I think Shamus is pretty on the money with this one :)

Personally i found the most annoying thing in this game the small number of minions allowed. It stopped me from having enough of anything. You can change a config file and increase this a little, which makes everything a lot easier. once i found this was possible i found the game much more enjoyable and no longer needed to use cheats for money or more unit types just to get by.

For some reason i really thought there was an expansion for this game. possibly its just an unofficial patch from somewhere. I cant find it right now. *sigh*

If you have the spare room, something I love is creating false entrances that lead to a very complex system of hallways with traps. If you have 3-4 of those around your base (and your base has only 2 entrances), you just neutralised about 66% of the arrival.

Specially effective if you use a lot of blowing traps to funnel all the intruders into the bottom of the death trap (or even have them being blown in circle). I set my traps so the first guy that trigger a trap would allow the whole team to be automatically catched.

Just watch out for super-agents. Those have the bad habits of just blowing up your trap complex.

Evil Genius was a heck of a lot of fun – I found that I tended to ignore the destroy-the-world part of the plot and move instead to the freeform design-the-perfect-base stage.

Tunnels that go nowhere, traps that trigger traps that trigger traps, and seeing just how far you can fire an agent, making best use of the various stolen artifacts, and finding the optimum henchman to cause outright mayhem.
(hint: Ivan is almost always the wrong choice if you like your base *not* to be on fire)

I do wish there was a way to skip straight to the second island, the main problem is you have a lot more heat when you move there though plenty of cash, and its damn frustrating when all your artifacts are sitting out on the helipad while you frantically build a base to put them in as agents parachute all around you.

I also have to thank Scourge for posting the link to the flash version, and handily wasting a morning of my work. Gracias :)

@Macil Oddly enough, when I read the review my first thought was “Hey, that sounds like Star Wars: Rebellion, except that in that game you can increase the game speed.” So what I’d do in that game is set my orders to build something or hyperspace to a planet or do a mission on the slowest mode, run it forward, and then when it hit the day where it happened slow it down again, do what came next, and so on. Addictive game, Rebellion …

@Sickofpalantirs “Lord of the Rings, the Third Age” … I can’t remember, is that the PC/console strategy game, or the console RPG? The console RPG is … good, except that the ending is really, really cheezy.

I was going to mention that mentioning steam while gog.com has it is heresy! No DRM and 50% cheaper for me, European.

I’ve played it a month or two ago. But I stopped playing close to the end of the first mission. It’s just too frustrating at times. So those evil guys come in and kill your last X. Now you have to spend at least half an hour to get that fixed.

A shame really. The game has a great idea and a ton of charm. And I am still wondering if it’s possible to make a trap filled with sharks with frigging laserbeams on their heads.

“I've played it a month or two ago. But I stopped playing close to the end of the first mission. It's just too frustrating at times. So those evil guys come in and kill your last X. Now you have to spend at least half an hour to get that fixed.”

I loved Evil Genius. I did not decently far but eventually the heat got to much for me. James Bond (or whatever he was called) and his super-agent buddies were kicking my butt. I got pretty far to building my doomsday device but then I said, “What the heck? This isn’t worth it.” And stopped playing. A shame because it is a great game. What I do really wish is that someone would make an Evil Genius II that had the charm of the first one but a serious improvement on gameplay.